There are currently ten different floor coverings on the ground floor of my house. That may or may not be normal, I don’t know. I do know it’s a bit annoying. There used to be carpet in several of the rooms, but I have been slowly disposing of that.
My kitchen/dining room is in the worst state of them all. It’s undergoing a fairly major metamorphosis, actually, so it has a bit of an excuse. It used to be three rooms, one of which was actually an addition that was not really open to the house. After ripping down some walls and opening things up, I have still not “finalized” the arrangement. I have temporarily run laminate flooring through the entire thing.
The laminate was free. John pulled it out of his former house and I took it away. I fully intend to get rid of it at some point, although more work needs to be done before the flooring can be finalized.

I recently walked into a store and was surprised to see the floor was actually wood. It was an old building, so it should have been no surprise. The floor was in pretty good condition in spite of its age and the constant flow of traffic on it. Pine board, 8 inches wide, made up the floor. There was some sign of finish on there but most had worn off under the treading of endless feet.
Many people love the idea of wood floors but wouldn’t particularly like raw, wide pine boards under their feet. They’d have to shine them up somehow and then be appalled at how damaged the floor got as time progressed. But such a floor just illustrates that damage can only have so much impact on a real wood floor and, after a while, it will settle into a certain kind of “look”. Endless such floors have been ruined by painting attempts, by rented floor sanders, and even more such floors have been buried under carpet that only looks good for about ten years and smells good for even less (nothing smells quite like old carpet, except maybe the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag).
I would love to have nice old pine boards throughout every inch of my house, but only if they’d already been there for sixty or seventy years. I wouldn’t want to go get weathered boards and do the floor with them, although many people do. I’m sure many of them are equally horrified when the authentic dings and scratches begin to get buried under the new dings and scratches.

Many people would balk at a wood floor in a kitchen and cry out that I should put ceramic tile in there and in the bathrooms. Maybe that’s a good idea. But it’s quite important to have a floor that’s strong enough to support ceramic tile. My floor currently bounces like a trampoline, although I have done work in the basement to rectify the situation. The half-inch plywood on the floor is not sufficient for ceramic tile, as evidenced by the situation in the bathroom when I moved in (I believe I mentioned this before). Every grout line was broken. To their credit, I admit the installers did have the special quarter-inch plywood under the tile, but it was still not enough to prevent flexing. Once the grout is broken, water is free to roam under the tiles and will stay there until it’s done as much damage as it can. In this case, it rotted the floor.

Originally, linoleum ran stem to stern in this house. They made the floor, rolled out the linoleum, glued it down, then built the walls. They did roll out plastic sheeting over the linoleum to protect it. The beauty of a modular home. I must say, I was surprised to see linoleum under the partition walls.
Linoleum is now a bit old-fashioned, but it sure was resilient stuff. I think some form of it was used to make the special heat-resistant shielding on the nose of the space shuttle, to protect it during re-entry.
Here, it proves impossible to remove, so anything new gets put over it.

I’m not going to go out and buy a half-dozen rolls and run them through the house, though, no matter how much mica-sparkle it contains. But I’d rather that to laminate, which looks like a computer-animated version of a floor and feels like the inside of a portable toilet. I’d need to fortify my floor for any ceramic. And I’d rather spread a good load of topsoil directly on the floor than to have it trapped in carpet.
Maybe I should just go get some nice wide pine boards.